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Summary
An insurgent attack that left a large NATO convoy in flames in Pakistan is unlikely to disrupt the supply of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Wednesday.Gunmen torched as many as 60 trailers and killed seven people in the attack on a truck depot south of Islamabad, one of the biggest losses of its kind, officials in Pakistan said. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called it a vicious attack of some scale but said it represented only a small fraction of the supplies pouring into Afghanistan amid a major buildup of US and NATO forces. Fifty or 60 containers is not a small attack by any means, but you look at that in terms of its impact on our overall operations, it's not going to have an effect, he said. A spate of similar attacks on convoys near the border with Afghanistan in late 2008, when 80 percent of US supplies went through Pakistan, prompted the US military to diversify its supply lines. A spokesman for the Defense Logistics Agency, which is responsible for supplying non-lethal goods to US forces in Afghanistan, said it has shipped 60,000 containers of food, medical supplies, and construction material into Afghanistan since 2009. Of that, 75 percent has gone through Pakistan and 25 percent through what's called the northern distribution network, or NDN.
